Thought of You: Visual Poetry Meets Dance in 2D Animated Magic

What modern dance has to do with pregnancy and the all-consuming creative impulse.

By Maria Popova

Brace yourself, for this is the most beautiful, spellbinding animation you’ll see this year.

For the past 15 years, animator and designer Ryan Woodward has created visual magic for just about every major Hollywood studio, most recently by storyboardingSpiderman 3 and Where The Wild Things Are. But it was his personal fascination with the motion of the human body in dance and his childhood nostalgia for 2D animation that sparked an absolutely wonderful personal project: Thought of You, a beautiful short film that blends figurative works, 2D animation, visual Fx, and contemporary dance.

Hold your breath and drink in.

The story’s emotional range is quite extraordinary, from the sweet restlessness of new love to the all-absorbing infatuation of passion at its peak to the hollow longing for a lover gone.

The creative process of the film is almost as beautiful as the animation itself, from the 35-weeks-pregnant choreographer who worked on it to the tender dynamic of the love story that underlies the film.

It’s one of those things that it’s tough to answer, when you ask an artist why they decide to be an artist. There’s this inner beast of creativity that, for me personally, it will consume me to the point of being miserable if I don’t let it out and do something with it.” ~ Ryan Woodward

But perhaps most gratifying of all is the wonderful cross-pollination of different arts that the film embodies — living proof of our credo that interdisciplinary curiosity informs and inspires creative work more powerfully than any one silo possibly could.

Enjoying the score? The song used in the film is World Spins Madly On by The Weepies, one of our favorite bands.

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